


Even In The Darkness I’m A Roman Candle

by ventandvent



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Carmilla AU, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 08:21:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3202226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ventandvent/pseuds/ventandvent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carmilla AU, or the one where Laura takes a memory potion to forget her pain & Carmilla before she realises only too late that Carmilla is alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even In The Darkness I’m A Roman Candle

“How’s Laura?”

The question was whispered, muttered, never spoken directly to her, but Laura could still feel their stares and questions plaguing her. She mostly let Perry handle them but sometimes even Perry was asking the questions.

Danny too, was never quite the fix that Laura needed, she was helpful but she wasn’t exactly what she wanted, almost there but not really. But Laura knew what it was she truly wanted.

Laf seemed to be the only one who could act a little calmer and nicer towards her, to make her feel like she hadn’t just lost the sole most important person in her life.

Laf was the only one who treated Laura normally, and that was the single thing she needed when she spent every night crying and curled up in Carmilla’s bed, wishing for a different time; a different ending.

The pain she felt was the type of pain that soothed her body into numbness whilst wracking her brain with jolts of pain every so often when she reminded herself of the reality of the situation.

It was the sort of never-ending pain that brought her to knees most days – the days she could even make it out of bed.

It was the sort of pain that made her cry out at night, when she awoke from her dreams yelling Carmilla’s name only to find no one there to comfort.

It was the sort of pain that made her wish she could never feel a single thing again.

And so when Laura went looking for Laf at the alchemy club, although there wasn’t any obvious motive, there was still an underlying hope of something she could lay her hands on to stop the pain. And she wasn’t thinking about painkillers anymore. 

* * *

Laura walked through her dorm room entrance, immediately tossing her bag onto the ground and collapsing on Carm’s bed, holding the small, capped flask up to the light.

The sun through the window revealed in the liquid a swirling pattern she was sure Carmilla would have liked had she been there to see it. Had she been there. Had she been alive.

Laura shook her head at the possibility, even with every detail explained to her it still didn’t seem real, it didn’t seem fathomable.

She stared at the tiny bottle for a little while longer before placing it in her drawer and contemplating the possibility.

She thought about the idea of forgetting someone, she examined her idea of happiness and she examined her idea of sadness, and knew without any reasonable doubt that she would never be happy again. She knew in her mind that with full knowledge of Carmilla’s death still glimmering through the darkness, extorting her brain and making her cry herself to sleep each night she would never regain any form of self.

She knew if she continued like this she would drive herself to her death, she knew if she didn’t force herself to forget Carmilla she would never recover.

But at the back of her mind was still a niggling doubt, that despite the panic attacks that she experienced when she forgot that Carmilla had died, despite the tears and the sleepless nights, despite the vomiting and despite the missing piece of her chest where she could feel her heart aching with a pain; a physical pain that made her choke, despite these things she still wanted to keep the memory of Carmilla with her.

She still wanted the memory of a girl so beautiful and intricate that took her breath away every time she thought of her to remain with her forever.

So she thrust aside the motion of forgetting Carmilla but still kept the tiny bottle in her drawer, never looking back until one night, one night when the pain became took much.

* * *

Laura sat on her bathroom floor, wheezing and crying and sniffling as she repeatedly hit her head against the wall behind her, wringing her wrists back and forward. The motion in her wrists built a rhythm and she kept the rhythm, as if it was the only thing keeping her sane as she cried to herself in her bathroom.

She had just experienced flashbacks of the last night she had ever seen Carmilla whilst she was showering, and as she had collapsed onto the floor, blindly reaching up to turn the water off and gasping and choking on the stale air around her, she couldn’t stop thinking about the tiny bottle of liquid that could end all her pain.

She had tried to suppress the panic attacks, to stifle the crying and tell herself she could live with the pain if only for the memory of beautiful Carmilla to keep with her forever, but this night was the night she cracked. This night was the night she broke and couldn’t fix herself one more time.

She decided she could never do this again, and as she dragged her body up against the bathroom wall and wrapped a towel around her shaky soaking body, she decided to finally do what she had been avoiding for weeks.

She got dressed slowly, into cotton shorts and a comfortable tank top, letting her mind grope around for her fondest memories of Carm before wiping them completely.

She thought of Carmilla bringing her cocoa, she remembered Carmilla punching her leg softly and reassuring her that she  _could_ do what she wanted, Carmilla telling her how brave she was, she remembered Carm making a deal with her mother and thought of how far her beautiful silly vampire would go to protect her.

_Would have gone. She’s dead now, past tense._

Laura drew the bottle up to her face, testing the cap before bringing the bottle to her lips, sitting down on her bed as she did so, nervously letting the liquid trickle down her throat.

She swallowed all of it, and tossed the bottle on the floor as she rested her head against her pillow,  _against their pillow._

She could feel her head numbing and her brain drifting as she her body let sleep take over her.

And as she passed from her conscious state of mind, her thoughts were already with Carmilla, of her smile and her laugh and her tendency to be nice when she wanted to.

As she her brain turned to blackness Carmilla’s laugh was the only thing Laura could hear, with all the pain seeping out of her body.

* * *

A knock on her door woke Laura up, and she groaned as the door opened and a nervous looking Perry entered the room.

Laura immediately sat up smiling, rubbing her eyes and glancing around her dorm room. Something was a little off, that was for sure, but she felt normal, she felt happy.

Perry frowned when she noticed Laura’s grinning, sleepy face but ignored it as she burst into speech.

“Hey Laura, um, so something happened. And um, I just wanted to come prepare you so that you wouldn’t freak out,” Perry began, and Laura, only half listening and still tired from her sleep sat up in her bed, eyeing an empty bottle of  _something_ lying on the ground.

“So Kirsch, and some of his Zeta bros, were um, throwing cherry bombs into the big pit under the Lustig. And um, they found, um,” Perry only managed to get out half of what she obviously wanted to say before Danny entered the room behind her carrying a sagging figure in her arms and placed the girl on Laura’s bed.

“Okay sorry, she’s heavier then she looks,” as Danny placed the body down on the bed Perry looked around the room nervously before landing quizzically on Laura. When Laura expressed no leaping desire to get up or appear happy, Perry shared a look with Danny who was equally as confused as her.

Laura was still in mild shock from everyone bursting into her room and was tired from sleep so she could only assume this was some strange Silas thing that would go away soon enough.

Danny seemed to think that Laura was just in shock so she decided to act and grabbed the infamous soymilk cartoon and placing it to Carmilla’s lips.

Why this strange girl who was closer to death then Laura could ever remember being needed soymilk to revive her was beyond her.

Perry wasn’t even looking at Danny and Carmilla, she just stared at Laura before noticing the small glass bottle lying empty on the ground.

As her curiosity arose, she leant down to read the label and gasped at what she saw.

The tiny label read ‘Property of the Alchemy Club. Do not distribute. Personally prescribed memory loss potion’ and Perry recoiled at the thought of who had used this.

As she turned back to Laura, everything came rushing together and she nearly fainted from pure emotion.

It suddenly all clicked; Laura’s mildly confused but fairly blank expression and her lack of interest in who was virtually the love of her life who had essentially just come back to life.

Her attention was brought back to Carmilla as the girl choked out a cough and sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.

Perry heard herself whispering a soft but continuous stream of ‘no’s and she shoved the tiny bottle under Danny’s nose before motioning quickly to Laura.

As realisation hit Danny’s eyes the room was hit by Carmilla’s sarcastic drawl.

“Well that was a kick,” Perry fell to her knees, she knew how bad these last weeks had been but she never thought-

“Um, I’m sorry, but who are you?” Laura’s innocent question reverberated around the room, followed by a gulp and a hiccup from Danny.

Carmilla was staring at Laura, her eyes flickering to Perry and Danny with confusion before returning to Laura.

“Carmilla?” Carmilla almost asked the room, addressing Laura but not without including Perry and Danny in her confused state.

“Carmilla? Who’s Carmilla?” Laura’s words struck a blow on Carmilla as she physically sat back, anger setting in on her features.

“Laura, this isn’t funny,” she began, her features quickly becoming distraught.

“How do you know my name?”

“What?”

Carmilla stared at Laura, her mouth agape as her riveted eyes slowly shifted to Perry. Perry could only offer up the tiny flask with the Alchemy Club’s logo on the top of the bottle.

As realisation set in on Carmilla’s face, Perry could only think of a storm as she watched Carmilla’s face begin to process what she was reading.

A storm that released a continuous stream of thunder, striking out with an occasional bolt of lightning, but most of all a storm so dark and windy and rainy that no light brought by the lightning could stay long.

A storm of anger and confusion and lost hope and love and sadness but most of all a storm of an unstoppable force of bitter, sorrowful melancholy.

An incurable sadness that would continue for what seemed for all eternity.

An incurable sadness that would never give the same love or receive the same love again.

An incurable sadness that drove Carmilla to her knees, that made her pound her fists on the ground; that made her stare at Laura with such neglect and betrayal that she knew she could never recover from.

And Laura’s blank expression only twisted a rusty dagger deeper into Carmilla’s already dead heart.

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot was inspired by this post on Tumblr: (tiny-gay-aurora.tumblr.com/post/107536591338/ouat-inspired-angst-after-carmilla-seemingly). All fics on this page are posted from my Tumblr: (hollsteinie.tumblr.com)


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